“The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to repurpose $243 million of its emergency coronavirus funding to support the modernization of systems supporting veterans’ education benefits.”
“As more higher education institutions take courses online for the foreseeable future, the VA realized it too will have to make adjustments in the way it processes veterans’ educational benefits claims under the GI Bill, VA officials said Wednesday. Unfortunately, they hadn’t anticipated this sustained virtual learning environment in their original justification for emergency funding in the CARES Act, which Congress passed early into the pandemic in March…”
“VA Undersecretary of Benefits Paul Lawrence said the Veterans Benefits Administration got ‘$13 million or $14 million’ under the CARES Act for personal protective equipment. ‘We couldn’t anticipate how the universities and education [institutions would respond], or we would’ve asked for more,’ he said, adding that he and Bogue then went to VA and Office of Management and Budget leadership to get its blessing.”
“VA has been working to modernize its GI Bill benefits systems since 2018, when new statues in the 2017 Forever GI Bill sparked chaos within VA’s systems for education benefits, leaving some veterans without the funding they were entitled to for housing.”
Beyond the SaaS acquisition
“While the department has an acquisition strategy in place to modernize the existing environment of legacy education benefits systems and sent out a request for information on commercial software-as-a-service solutions last month, COVID-19 forced the VA to reconsider the future of education and how the Digital GI Bill system, as it’s called, will reflect that…”
“Of the $243 million the VA is asking to be reprogrammed, $198 million of it will go to VBA to fund the acquisition of the SaaS solution, and the rest will go to VA’s Office of Information and Technology to support the modernization on the backend, Bogue said. The VA received $19.6 billion in the CARES Act. About $2.15 billion of that went to IT support of the department’s response to the pandemic.”
“Now it all depends on congressional appropriators to approve of the reprogramming…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA wants to reprogram CARES Act funds for GI Bill system modernization – By Billy Mitchell, September 16, 2020. FedScoop.
